King: The cost of terrorism far outweighs its risks

Bill King says we should remember that drunken drivers, heart disease and cancer kill more Americanseach year than actions by terrorists.

By Bill King

Updated 4:08 pm, Saturday, May 4, 2013

As a result of the Boston Marathon bombings, one politician after another has paraded in front of the television cameras to proclaim that terrorism is one of the great problems our country faces. Well, actually not so much.

According to the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland, there have been about 1,000 terrorism incidents in the U.S. since 1980. (By the way, terrorism is defined as an act of violence that has some political, social or religious motivation, so incidents like the shootings in Newtown, Conn., or Aurora, Colo., are not counted.) Only a handful of the terrorism incidents have resulted in any fatalities. In total, there have been 3,300 terrorism-related fatalities in the U.S. since 1980. Of course, nearly 3,000 occurred in the Sept. 11 attacks. More than half of the balance were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The average number of people who have died from terrorism in the U.S. since 1980 has been about 100 per year. If you take out the Sept. 11 attacks the average is about 10 fatalities per year. By comparison, the National Weather Service estimates that lightning strikes kill about 40 people in the U.S. each year. More than 10,000 people were killed by drunken drivers. Cancer and heart disease each kill more than a half million each year.

Even if you look at terrorism globally, the numbers are relatively insignificant. According to the National Counterterrorism Center's 2011 Annual Report on Terrorism, about 12,500 people were killed worldwide in terrorism incidents. About two-thirds of those fatalities occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan. About the same number of people die each week from malaria.

Yet, we certainly spend as if terrorism were the most serious problem we face. Trying to estimate how much we are spending on terrorism is a little tricky. The budget for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is about $60 billion annually, but that includes expenditures such as the U.S. Coast Guard, which we would have even if there were no war on terror. Of course, if you include the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the total is well over $1 trillion. By comparison, the federal budget for cancer research is about $5 billion annually, notwithstanding cancer kills 5,000 times as many people as terrorism does.

What is it about terrorism that frightens us so badly even though we daily face much greater risks with relative equanimity? Why is it that we are willing to throw hundreds of billions of our tax dollars at this problem, yet pinch pennies on problems that have much more dramatic and dire effects on our daily life?

Psychologists suggest there are a number of factors that affect how frightened we are by different risks. For example, we generally fear risks with which we are less familiar than those common to us. As a result, most of us fear snakes even though the average person rarely sees one, while smoking, which kills hundreds of thousands each year, is ho-hum.

Similarly, we generally fear things that we do not control versus those we do control, or at least, believe we control. For instance, many people fear flying, where they are out of control, but not driving, which they do, notwithstanding that driving is statistically many times more dangerous than flying.

We have been trained by thousands of years of survival to react to things that frighten us, either by trying to avoid or control them. With regard to terrorism, because it is such a remote risk, the only way to attempt to avoid or control it is to allow our elected officials to throw huge sums of money at the problem. As a result, by any rational calculus we are spending far more on containing terrorism than the risk warrants.

If we were to spend the kind of money we spend on terrorism on cancer research or providing every family in Africa with a malaria net, millions of lives would be saved. But sadly, our own psychological programming and its effects on our political system make that highly unlikely.